InfoUSA to create full UK business address list

by Alex Donohue, Brand Republic 20-Sep-07, 12:00

LONDON - Business and consumer data company InfoUSA has announced plans to compile a comprehensive address list for every UK business, including names of every manager, numbers of employees and a website address for every location.

The directory, which will be compiled through an estimated 2-3 million phone calls a year to garner information on UK businesses, will be coordinated from Manchester as an entirely in-house operation.

The Nebraska-based company said the completed database would be sold to small and large clients through an online, subscription service and licence agreement format.

InfoUSA, which specialises in business and consumer databases, said the full UK business address database would be augmented with a yearly telephone survey, which will update information about each business, including the name of the owner and manager, the year when it was established, whether it is a single location operation, and the number of people presently working for the company.

Comments

Hugh Bessant - 20/09/2007

An interesting proposal, but InfoUSA will need to make more like 3.5m phone calls to get a truly comprehensive file. With experience of telephone verification, I would suggest the level of detail they are intending to get would make it hard to get more than 30 full records out of one call centre operative - 4.28 an hour assuming a 7 hour day. Thus they would need a call centre with 583 seats to call the UK business universe. If you assume £20k per year, that is salary costs of £1.1m, giving a cost base well in excess of £3m, probably more. And that is assuming you only have to make one call to each business to get this level of detail. A laudable claim, but a huge challenge.

SIMON LAWRENCE - 20/09/2007

With the market already saturated, a trend to smaller volumes and prices for data falling, its difficult to see the logic. Hugh's right - InfoUSA will need deep pockets to get this off the ground considering that the data will need a couple of calls cycles to even start to be developed - but InfoUSA are large - and may have some large US sponsors to help fund it. It would also be interesting to know what source data they will be using. The key current sources are all OSIS derived and if this is the same - and there is a fairly shallow level of information being collected it's difficult to see enough points of differentiation with whats currently available. Some may remember that GTE Directories tried this many years ago - with no success whatsoever. We'll be watching with interest.!